On art and devotion
and Archive 81 and Station Eleven…
This is what I believe.
*spoilers ahead*
I believe these two shows, Archive 81 and Station Eleven, are essentially about the same thing, our relationship to art and how we communicate with It All and how we transmit what we get from It.
Though both are set in post-apocalyptic scenarios¹, their approach to that connection couldn’t be more different.
Archive 81 showcases a very common pattern of the dominant culture. Privileged self-obsessed ignorant mayosapiens with far too much time in their hands have angst about something they are unwilling to address. They rather have the world bend to their cravings regardless of the impact. Paired with their tremendous insecurity, they delude themselves into believing they are doing that bending for the greater good.
Appropriation of sacred rituals (AKA theft), abuse and consumption of marginalised folk (including other mayosapiens of non-germanic origin) and a lot more of fuckery facilitated by money.
So far so brutally accurate.
What is really interesting about the show is the relation of the ritual showcased with media, in particular film and painting. There are specific details about re-creating a ritual space using modern media that the show absolutely nails, like repetition and going through the process of surrendering our undivided attention to the media. They also touch on being consumed by art whilst being a conduit is addressed in a way I am familiar with.
It is important to notice, most people don’t seem to be enjoying their location. That is true even the people who apparently get the benefits of ransacking humans and calling beings of another dimension. There is no pleasure, no joy at all.
Bar the actions of Those Who Are To Be Consumed, every other action feels panicky and with friction. That actually matches what to me happens IRL, so two points to Gryffindor for not pretending that in such a system the ones at the top get any fulfilment at all.
Another important thing I noticed is the inability of all characters, especially the kind-hearted ones, to step away from the scenic route (AKA pain and doom) to get trauma resolution. I mean, this reminds me of an article I read a while back about Servant and how from a Black perspective that wasn’t a horror show but a comedy where all mayosapiens were ignoring the red flags and the alarm bells and going and poking the tiger, and how that attitude was the common trope of mayosapiens’ heralded horror films and shows. That article reminded me how as a child I used to think all gringos were morons because they always got killed in films. So there.
The main characters are hooked by a violent path and are more than willing to ignore the hissing threats they are constantly presented with. They are relentless in their pursuit of suffering, they have bought into ignoring their intuition and instead bank on mayosapiens’ victim culture.
I mean, I like Melody but what she mostly does is scream aimlessly, fall into codependence and avoid breathing properly. My man Dan, on the other hand, gets hooked on her ride.
It’s a pivotal sign that the most sober character, Father Russo, gets killed early on the show so that we know there won’t be any further attempt to get down from the rollercoaster of reactivity.
On the other hand, despite the horrors of massive numbers of dead people and encounters with violent scavengers, the characters of Station Eleven try to avoid the scenic route as much as possible and, to the best of their abilities, they address promptly their emotional aches. They too dab heavily into using art to connect to something greater but they are way less driven to make it a vehicle of consumption and enslavement. They are more sober and with that, more human.
I mean, most humans aren’t renouncing gravity to become space cadets and spiralling down by discovering cults, long lost parents and dead bodies.
Most of us simply want to feel safe, get on with our day and enjoy it with a nice meal and good company.
Station Eleven is about a variety of attempts to do that and, in the process, something very important is to be revealed.
I believe that every book could become a Bible for someone. I have many. Some I gathered as a child (Pedro Páramo, Knulp), others as a fully grown adult in foreign lands (The Discovery of Heaven, The House of Leaves).
I’ve known and felt that relation to books in my heart and bones for a long time.
Therefore, I wasn’t surprised when Kirsten and Tyler read and re-read the graphic novel, extracting everything they could. Their condition of children allows them to set aside what others take as pretentiousness and connect with the creator who experienced her own apocalypse at an early age.
The experience of loss Miranda carries and her personalised creation of context to survive and then thrive after that loss is what covertly fuels the novel and it is what Tyler and Kirsten can sense. They can pierce the veil to extract it via repetition of a mundane act.
Context is everything, they need it and drink from that well. They allow themselves to be possessed by the forces Miranda downloaded but, unlike the artists of Archive 81, they are not mere disconnected and abused meat puppets of those forces. They have a deep relationship with the forces they interact with, even if they are the only ones understanding them.
It’s that relationship with something greater that gives them their intuitive power. A Kirsten who can walk away from the Travelling Symphony and come back at her will. A Tyler who with ease relates with a numerous amount of feral children who are well adapted to thrive in this new existence. They both have power that most adults can’t harness.
The bond between Kirsten and Tyler is a strong one. It starts with Arthur and Miranda but it goes beyond, deeper and it doesn’t need romance for it to work and be felt. It reminds me of the bond between Aes Sedai and Warder of The Wheel of Time.
That bond between strangers is also played in Archive 81 although that show hints at a more romantic rescue-the-princess type of endeavour.
Circling back to the art part, I quite like the deliberate use of theatre for negotiation and resolution of conflict. Removing all the extras of acting to simply use the lines as a vehicle and become something, embody it and let that force, that presence possess you and hold you without the need of a Drama Therapist or a Constellations facilitator. I remember feeling a similar passion overtaking me when the actors of the Czech film The Karamazov Brothers spontaneously started rehearsing their lines when doing mundane stuff. I felt the play more in those moments than in the actual play.
That passionate love affair with the subject and source of one’s art, that fulfilment and joy and becoming is what the artists of Archive 81 miss. They remain trapped because of their inability to relate deeply and honestly with themselves and others.
On one hand, art and media are consumed to feed hungry ghosts and, on another, someone pours herself on a book and creates a manual for existence. That someone dies but not before protecting life, the life of people she may have resented. That goes in her book too.
On one hand, it is all about extracting power and, on another, it is about recognising domination is unsustainable and that children are key.
We don’t need a privileged old sod reprising a long ritual when there is a happy child dancing in the yard.
1.- This will be clarified in a future article.
P.S. I do acknowledge it is super ridic everyone somehow knows Hamlet by hard though.
P.S.2 Station Eleven has one of the most beautiful scenes of being healed by life and childbirth.
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An earlier draft of this essay was published on January 17th, 2022 on Facebook.
